Interface of the future

[Patrice Terrier]

If you want to give to your application the look of the future:
Try it there
I can create an exclusive interface for you, that will let you stand out of the crowd.
And the look of your window will be exactly the same on XP and VISTA!

Note: This type of interface could be done only in plain SDK coding style, and only with SDI window (no CreateDialog, no DDT).

[Mark Strickland]

FireFly?

Patrice,

Do you think you could make something similar work with FireFly? Maybe not the whole look of the crystal demo but at least something a little "flashy".

I tried WinLIFT (with your help if you remember) but because of the Tabs on Tabs structure of my program it would not work. FireFly3 (yet to be released) may have a different structure.

I assume this uses GDImage. If you want to assist, point me in the right direction and I will experiment a bit. I will post back any favorable results here.

I mostly do just business programming and I really don't want it to look like a "game" but obviously having some of the features of GDImage would make a "statement" for any program that it is "more sophisticated". Sometimes selling the "sizzle" is as important as selling the "steak". If I could see how GDImage would work for me I would purchase it.

Thanks

[Patrice Terrier]

Everything is explained on Jose Roca's forum, with complete SDK source code...

I can't do more than this, except designing a specific graphic interface just for you

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[William Burns]

Crashes my PC

Interface of the future..... hmmmmm so everything in the future crashes? LOL

My PC screen scrambles when I run it. Looks kinda like when I try to display a resolution that my flat panel screen does not support. Even Ctrl Alt Del does not bring up a screen I can see, but a reboot does fix it.

Does it maybe change the screen resolution when it runs?

PC: Pent D 2.6ghz dual core
RAM: 2gb
OS: XP SP2
Monitor: Dell 17inch Flat Panel Monitor running at 1280x1024 (32bit color)
Video: nVidia GeForce 7900GT PCI Express with 256mb RAM

[Elias Montoya]

William, i have a PC configuration similar to yours, Except for the 2GB ram,
i nly have 512MB ram, and the demo run fine.

Pentium D 3.0 Ghz (also dual core of course)
512 RAM
GeForce 5700 256 MB ram.
Windows XP SP2.

I dont see a way to crash it. What did you do?

[Patrice Terrier]

William

XP is the past... VISTA is the future

However no problem here runing it on XP, except than you can't see the Blur and Crystal effects.

[William Burns]

I think it probably has something to do with my flat panel monitor. They have a great clear picture, but seem to be pretty limited on the number of resolutions they support. In fact if I change it to anything other than 1280x1024 the monitor will put up a warning box saying the preferred size is 1280x1024. (it does work with some other sizes, but doesnt look as clear)

Like I said, when I run the program it looks like it does when I change the screen resolution to a size it does not support. Not just your app, but the whole screen goes nuts. I can press Alt-F4 to close your app and everything goes back to normal.

No big deal, I was just reporting it as a FYI.

PS. Vista may be the future, but it might be more distant for some companies. I am working on a cost study for upgrading our 68,000 PCs to Vista, and when you are talking hardware and software upgrade costs to do Vista for that many PCs, the numbers get pretty unrealistic even for a company our size. Its hard to justify that many millions of dollars when XP is doing what we need right now. (and even faster than Vista on the same hardware according to our testing) Eventually I am sure we will make the move, but by then hopefully we will have replaced more of the older hardware from the normal day to day hardware replacements.

[Patrice Terrier]

William

It is not a matter of screen resolution, but more probably because your config is not well behaved to run OpenGL that is very sensitive about hardware (both video board and screen display).

Try this version it doesn't use OpenGL:
http://www.zapsolution.com/preview/crystal_vista.zip
(however better to try it on VISTA)

[William Burns]

Must be the OpenGL, because that one works just fine. (Cool interface by the way)

[Mike Doty]

Crashed my XP SP2 system. Can't you test for minimum requirements?

[Patrice Terrier]

Mike,

When running the CrystalP.zip, the minium requirement is to have a computer that is VISTA ready or compatible.

It means you must have a dedicated graphic video board with its own video memory (shared memory is a NoNo).
And the graphic card must be DirectX and OpenGL compatible.

If this is not the case, then try the crystal_vista.zip demo instead.

Now that all the new computers are sold with VISTA already pre-installed, you better test your own software to see if they work on it.
I checked my own multimedia audio and video commercial applications and found soon that they needed to be rewritten to run with it

I did shared what I have learned about VISTA on Jose Roca's forum, and the demos I have posted there, are the result of what I have learned so far.

"interface of the future" could be also translated like this, "are you VISTA ready?"
and by the way CrystalP.zip is a good way to check if your computer is VISTA compatible or not

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[Elias Montoya]

I support fully your ideas Patrice (see my thread about the next logical step in the Cafe Forum), Unfortunately this is no perfect world, as this thread has proven, and its a good idea to provide at least a bit of backwards compatibility.

Today i tried for like half hour to have the Mac page to work, with no success and i
ended up trashing it. The moral of the story is that its a better idea to have a message:

"Your system is outdated, please upgrade to XYZ to have all the functionality."

Instead of having to guess that a crash means im outdated.

I have always loved your demos though. They are so cool.

[Patrice Terrier]

Elias

Indeed it is not a problem of backward compatibility, because both demos work just fine on XP computers that are toward to multimedia and games.

The problem is typical of hardwares using cheap components to keep their price low and that are mainly office oriented.
Why to have a good audio board and 512 Mb of video RAM, if it is just to make office or accounting work.

This has always been a common issue even in the "past"

Have you never played with "flight simulator"

My mistake was to think, that in a programming community, people were using state of the art computers, but of course I was wrong

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[Eric Cochran]

Patrice:

I have tried both versions (crystalp and crystal_vista) of your demo, and neither one is cooperating on my system. I'm not getting the unceremonious crashing that some of the others are reporting, but instead keep getting a message which says, "The operating system is not presently configured to run this application," at which point it terminates.

My computer may not be on the forefront of current technology (XP Pro x64 SP2, Athlon 64 3200+ (2.0 GHz), 1 GB RAM, GeForce FX 5700 Ultra 128 MB ), but it should be sufficient to run Vista, if a bit sluggishly, and I've run OpenGL apps quite smoothly on it before. Do your demos just not support XP x64?

EDIT: Been quite a while since I've posted a comment - guess I'd better update my specs.

[Patrice Terrier]

Eric,

"The operating system is not presently configured to run this application,"

This is typically a Microsoft message, not me I swear it

but it should be sufficient to run Vista

Yes, perhaps the Basic edition


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[William Burns]

Have you never played with "flight simulator"

My mistake was to think, that in a programming community, people were using state of the art computers, but of course I was wrong

LOL

And just how much do you expect people to spend on their video cards? I paid over $300 for the card I listed above "nVidia GeForce 7900GT PCI Express with 256mb RAM" this year and it is still listed for $289 7900gt oc 256l
I have no problems playing most modern PC games at high video settings. (even Halo2 which is supposed to be just for Vista)

I agree it is probably something to do with my setup. But my point is it would be counter productive to use an interface that requires everyone to spend $300+ on just their video cards.

[Patrice Terrier]

William

People should not mixed problem related to the use of OpenGL and the design of the interface, that shows the use of the AERO GLASS Blur and Crystal effect on VISTA.

So far most VISTA programmers are doing this with WPF, I showed that it could be done in PowerBASIC using directly the DWM API and without XML or other VISUAL STUDIO features, that was the point of my post, and best of all I posted what I have learned so far on Jose's forum, with the complete source code of the project, who else is doing this here, except JOSE of course

And want it or not, VISTA is the future, and Blur and Crystal effect is something that would become soon very familiar to most end users.

To corroborate what I say, just go on the CrystalXP web site and you will see what they are looking for.

Try to test the demo on a VISTA computer, enable Crystal mode, and adjust the opacity track bar, then you will get the picture.

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[John Spikowski]

VistaMizer

I just installed VistaMizer on my XP system. I'm not planning on upgrading to Vista in the foreseeable future and this is a nice way to get that Vista look and feel. I would be interested to hear form others that install VistaMizer on their XP box and also run MS Vista on another.

Here is the link to the authors site.

http://www.public.sytes.net/hoefs/windows/vistamizer.php?menu=windows&umenu=vistamizer&lang=en

I'll post something here if I run into any problems with VistaMizer that would cause me to change my mind about the software and revert back to the normal XP theme.

John

[Patrice Terrier]

John,

Such "Windows customize" tool, can't do what the native VISTA DWMAPI.DLL does. They are indeed doing face lifting, by changing the XP graphic components, but they do not provide an emulator for the advanced DWM api.



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[Patrice Terrier]

Desktop Window Manager

If you have no idea of what DWM is (Desktop Window Manager),
then do yourself a favor and clic on this link

MSDN Library